David Sawer: Flesh and Blood

Audiosamples

Flesh and Blood

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The complete perusal score (PDF-preview)

Work introduction

This new work, with words by the British playwright and poet Howard Barker, is about the parting of a soldier from his mother. It begins with the soldier expressing his dread and anxiety and wish for love and concealment, but as the scene develops this is revealed to be part of a ritual in which the soldier eventually insists that his mother send him to his death because she created him and therefore only she can dispose of him.

The conclusion is that she does then send him away, knowing he will never return, or only as a body. It is therefore shown that it is the mother (rather than, conventionally, the soldier) who makes the supreme sacrifice of their flesh and blood.

The music for the mother is at first lyrical and expressive, and that for her son more rhythmic and driven. As the piece develops, the two types of music gradually swap over.

World première

Location:

London

Date:

15.02.2013

Orchestra:

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Conductor:

Ilan Volkov

Press reviews

“Flesh and Blood (2012) was a great success, a 23-minute “dramatic scene” by David Sawer on the subject of love and war, a soldier departing from his mother. If Howard Barker’s text is sometimes impenetrable, Sawer’s music reveals all, vivid and explicit enough to set an opera before us, with even these singers’ respective ages being reasonably close to realistic.” – excerpt from Colin Anderson's review

“Barker, a playwright not renowned for clarity of characterisation, applies just the right level of dramatic ambiguity and poetic abstraction to the story of a mother sending her son off to war. […] Around this spare and allusive text, Sawer let the BBC Symphony Orchestra, tightly controlled by Ilan Volkov, burst into an engrossing series of cold furies: twitching harp and guttural strings, distressed, fluttering woodwind and discordant brass fanfares almost Mahlerian in their weight.” – excerpt from Neil Fisher’s review from The Times

“Attendant complexities of love, loss, violence and death are explored in a condensed way, with a fierce orchestral brilliance (equally effective use of tense pizzicato and blaring brass) and arresting vocal lines that were presented theatrically, persuasively and in Second World War costume by Marcus Farnsworth and Christine Rice.” – excerpt from The Sunday Times review

“Sawer’s vocal writing was assured and character-driven, assisted no doubt by his experience of writing a full-length opera, From Morning to Midnight. It is a measure of his achievement that the eloquent and vivid treatment of certain key words such as ‘clung’ and ‘fret’ were reminiscent of Britten at his most inspired. […] With its unusual but entirely apposite setting for two middle-range voices, and its judicious handling of a considerable body of orchestral players, Flesh and Blood was a darkly dramatic work in which David Sawer impressed by his innate sense of drama and his refreshingly unhackneyed approach to instrumentation. I hope this passionate and directly communicative score will soon be set down in a recording studio so that its many felicities may be more readily appreciated on CD.” – excerpt from Tempo, vol. 67/265, July 2013, Paul Conway